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The Sims 2
Mac OS X June 13, 2005 |genre= Life simulation game |modes= Single player |ratings= ESRB: T OFLC: T PEGI: 7+ |platforms= Windows Mac OS X |media= CD (4), DVD (1),Direct Download |requirements = Mac OS X * OS: Mac OS X 10.3.8+ * CPU: 1.2 GHz PowerPC G4/G5 * RAM: 256 MB * Disc Drive: DVD drive * HDD: 3 GB free space * Video: 32 MB ATI Radeon 9000/nVidia GeForce FX5200 Microsoft Windows * OS: Windows 98/98 SE/Me/2000/XP/Vista * CPU: 800 MHz * RAM: 256 MB * Disc Drive: 8x CD-ROM/DVD drive * HDD: 3.5 GB free space * Video: 32 MB DirectX 9.0 and T&L compatible * Sound: DirectX 9.0 compatible }} }} The Sims 2 is a 2004 strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to the best-selling computer game, The Sims, which debuted on February 4, 2000. It was first released on September 14, 2004 for Microsoft Windows. A port to Macintosh was released on June 13, 2005. Eight expansion packs and nine micro-expansion packs were subsequently released. In addition several console versions have been released. Though not commonly known, The Sims 2 is offered on mobile platforms. Mobile manufacturers such as Nokia offer The Sims 2 from the Ovi Store. It costs $4.99 USD. http://store.ovi.com/content/6A794C0B6BD59278E040050A87323A73?clickSource=related%2Bcontent A sequel, The Sims 3, was released in June 2009. The Sims 2 has the same concept as its predecessor. Players control their Sims in various activities and forming relationships in a manner similar to real life. The Sims 2, like its predecessor, The Sims, does not have a defined final goal; gameplay is open-ended. Sims have life goals, wants and fears, the fulfillment of which can produce both positive or negative outcomes. All Sims age, and can live over 100 Sim days depending on the degree of which their aspirations are fulfilled. The Sims 2 builds on its predecessor by allowing Sims to age through six stages of life and incorporating a 3D graphics engine. Although gameplay is not linear, story-lines exist in the games pre-built neighbourhoods. Pleasantview is based 25 years after the town in the original The Sims. Strangetown's storyline is based on the supernatural and loosely connected with Pleasantview and Veronaville's characters are based on Shakespearian characters. The Sims 2 was an instant success, selling a then-record one million copies in its first ten days. As of July 26, 2007, The Sims 2 has sold more than 13 million units worldwide and was the best-selling PC game of 2004. During April 2008, The Sims 2 website announced that 100 million copies of The Sims series had been sold. In addition to its commercial success, The Sims 2 was well received by critics gaining a 90% score from aggregators Metacritic and GameRankings. Gameplay Neighborhoods There are three pre-made neighborhoods in The Sims 2: Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville. Others come with various expansion packs. Many pre-made characters have their own storylines and history. The main neighborhood that has run through The Sims and The Sims 2 is Pleasantview (called both Sim Lane and Old Town in the original). Strangetown is based on a sci-fi theme and Veronaville is based on Shakespeare's works "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The Sims 2 is set 25 years after the first game. Live mode The gameplay revolves around controlling Sims with a point-and-click interface. Actions are performed by clicking on an in-game object and selecting an interaction with that object. Each sim has a life-span of approximately 90 sim days, each day lasting twelve minutes and progresses through six different age groups; babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, adults and elders. Each age-group has interactions specific to itself. Toddlers can be taught skills such as walking and talking, children are able to do homework for school and elders have the ability to retire and collect a pension. The game provides goals to the player in the form of wants and fears. Fears represent things for the player to avoid such as getting demoted or contracting a disease while wants are generally positive. They can involve buying new objects or reaching the top of a career track. Wants are selected randomly but are weighted towards a Sims' aspiration. Players are able to select one of five aspirations including family, fortune, popularity, knowledge and romance. These mainly deal with determining the chance of specific wants appearing on the want panel. Family Sims are more likely to experience wants involving having children while Fortune Sims will experience career-related wants. Completing wants will provide aspiration points, a currency which can be used to purchase reward objects such as a money tree or an elixir of life. Two important aspects are the Sims' needs and mood. Needs represent physical and psychological aspects of various sims and include the need to eat and sleep as well as the need for entertainment and to be hygienic. Needs are tied down to a sims mood which represents a sims willingness to perform specific tasks. Needs are indicated to the player in the form of bars which increase or decrease depending on what actions the sim is performing. Sims can also have specific relationships with other sims including friendly and romantic ones. A sims attitude towards other sims is represented with two bars: A short-term relationship bar and a long-term relationship bar. The short-term bar is easy to fill up but can also decrease rapidly. The long-term bar is less volatile. Sims that behave romantically can unlock the option to become engaged and married to other sims. These relationships are restricted to non-family members. Sims can choose one of ten career tracks in order to earn an income. A career track consists of ten levels which represent advancement along each of the ten levels. To move up to the next level, sims must advance in various skills which represent their ability to perform certain actions. The cooking skill represents how good a sim is at preparing meals and the speed in which they do so. Sims must also establish good relationships with other sims to move up the career ladder. The simology panel on the interface represents miscellaneous information to the player. A sims personality is represented as being on scale between one and ten for various elements including neatness, laziness, niceness, shyness and playfulness. These are a major factor in a sims autonomous behavior. Sims also have a specific weight and interests that are displayed when talking to other sims. Finally, sims can earn memories from specific events in their life. These can be positive or negative. Buy and Build mode From the neighborhood view, the player selects to play one lot, as in The Sims. There are residential and community lots. Sims live in residential lots, and can travel to community lots to purchase groceries, clothing and magazines as well as interact with Townies. The player can choose between playing a pre-made inhabited lot, moving a household into a built-up lot, or constructing a building on an empty lot. One novelty from The Sims 1 is foundations. The player switches between the "live" mode (default) to control Sims, the "buy" mode to add, move or delete furniture, or the "build" mode to rebuild the house. Buy and build mode for community lots is locked when player Sims visit the lot, but available from neighborhood view. It is also possible to import neighborhoods from Sim City. The game contains some time-bound social challenges that provide a reward if successful. Sims can throw parties to gain aspiration points, or invite the headmaster over for dinner in order to enroll their children in private school. Some expansion packs have new minigames (like running a Greek house in University, or dating in Nightlife). In Nightlife, each date is a challenge to keep both Sims as happy as possible, while accumulating aspiration points. Comparison to The Sims Graphically, The Sims 2 is more detailed than The Sims and allows players to view its world in full 3D. This is a change from earlier Sim games, such as SimCity 2000, which used dimetric projection and fixed resolutions, as the camera was in The Sims. In The Sims, Sims are 3D meshes, but The Sims 2 introduces far more detail in mesh quality, texture quality, and animation capability. A Sim's facial features are customizable and unique, and Sims can smile, frown, and blink. The player can adjust a Sim's features in the in-game Create-a-Sim tool; for example, noses can be made to be very large or very small. Texturing is achieved through use of raster images, though it appears more lifelike. The Sims 2 characters' pass through six life stages (seven with University), with eventual death of old age, while babies in The Sims only become children before ceasing to continue aging. The aspiration system (described above) is also new to The Sims 2. Sims can become pregnant and produce babies that take on genetic characteristics of their parents, such as eye color, hair color, facial structure, and personality traits. Genetics play a major role in the game, and as such, dominant and recessive genes play a larger role than they did in the original game. Some of the other additions to gameplay are career rewards, a week cycle, the cleaning skill, a variety of meals (depending on time of day), exercise clothing, body shape affected by diet and exercise, and houses built on foundations. Game customization The Sims 2 is an extremely malleable game. Modders alter the game in ways as simple as creating a new floor texture of rocks or as complicated as writing entire patches for the game code to customize its behavior. Such modifications are all loosely referred to as "custom content". Specifically, custom content can be divided into four categories: exporting (creating Sims and lots in-game or using the game's included Body Shop and exporting them to a file), recoloring (creating a new texture for an object), meshing (creating an object or modifying its shape) and hacking (writing code that manipulates game and object behaviors). The modding community for The Sims 2 is self-supporting, with more advanced modders writing tools and tutorials to help in creating custom content and modifying the game environment. The "Sims 2 Body Shop" is a program shipped with The Sims 2 that allows users to create custom clothing and body recolors, such as eyes, hair and skin tone. These custom created parts can be imported directly into the game, or can be uploaded onto the official The Sims 2 Exchange for other users to download and implement into their own games. Two elements that propagate customization are the official Sims 2 Exchange and the extensive network of fan sites that distribute custom content. More than 250,000 Sims and lots have been uploaded to the Sims 2 Exchange on the Official Site. Development EA Games announced on May 5, 2003 that the Maxis studio had begun development on The Sims 2. The game was first shown at E3 in Los Angeles, California on May 13, 2004. Will Wright admits that while most of the content of The Sims 2 are original ideas, inspiration for its own expansions and constituents spawned from the successes of the first game. The community interest in the antecedent The Sims: Unleashed and The Sims: Hot Date expansions ensured the creation of The Sims 2: Pets and The Sims 2: Nightlife expansions, respectively. After development concluded, designers from Maxis regarded The Sims 2 as very capricious during creation. Bugs would appear, and Sims would be "tweaked", or have anomalies not present in a previous run. A teaser trailer was provided on the ''Makin' Magic'' CD but was later uploaded to websites all over the Internet. Deleted content Originally, Maxis created a "Power Outage" scenario: during a storm, there would be a black-out, and the player had to keep high the "fun" motive for all the family members (and guests) without being able to use any electric device. If the player succeeded in such a mission, a windmill would have appeared in the catalog as a scenario reward. The windmill, basically, is an electric generator, that supplies power even in case of power outage. But Maxis abandoned the weather casualties and so the windmill had no reason to be officially released any more. Controversy The Sims 2 malleable content and open-ended customization have led to controversy on the subject of pay sites and sexual modifications. Custom content is distributed through independent websites, some of which charge for downloading materials. This is a breach of the game's EULA , which prohibits the commercial use of tools such as Bodyshop. The copyright to the package file (which is installed in the downloads folder so that the player can use custom content in-game) is held by Electronic Arts, making the sale of package files illegal. Some modifications, purportedly revealing sexual anatomy of the Sims, sparked legal controversy. On July 22, 2005, former Florida attorney Jack Thompson alleged that Electronic Arts and The Sims 2 promoted nudity through the use of a mod or a cheat code. The claim was made that pubic hair, labia and other genital details were visible once the "blur" (the pixelation that occurs when a Sim is using the toilet or is naked in the game) was removed. Electronic Arts issued a statement saying that when the censor was removed, Sims lack such anatomical definition, similar to Barbie and Ken dolls. Electronic Arts executive Jeff Brown said in an interview with GameSpot: Prior to Thompson's statement, there was a cheat code which removed pixelation accessible from the console menu. Shortly after the statement, subsequent patches and expansion packs removed the "intProp censorGridSize" code. Reception The Sims 2 had a successful E3. The game also received the Editor's Choice Award from IGN and GameSpy upon final review of the finished product. From 71 online reviews, the average score was 90 out of 100. Seven of those sources awarded the game a 100 out of 100 score. X-Play gave the game a 4/5 The Sims creator, Will Wright was recognized by being nominated at the Billboard Digital Entertainment Awards for Visionary and Game Developer. The game was also nominated for two international awards in 2005. Editions and add-ons Many Sims games have been ported to Mac OS X by Aspyr. The Sims 2 has also been released for a number of video game consoles including the PlayStation 2 entertainment system, the Xbox console, and the Gamecube. Look in The Sims 2 (console game) for more information based on The Sims 2 editions. Editions Expansion packs The Sims 2 expansion packs provide additional game features and items. Eight expansion packs have been released as of 2008. There are no current plans for more expansion packs beyond The Sims 2: Apartment Life. Stuff packs Stuff packs are add-ons that intend to add only new items (usually in the amount of 60) to the base game. However, some releases include certain gameplay elements introduced in previous expansion packs. There are nine stuff packs so far. The Sims 2: Holiday Party Pack served as the pilot release for this line of products, which were called "booster packs". After the success of the pilot release, EA named the releases "stuff packs" and launched the line with The Sims 2: Family Fun Stuff. The Sims 2: Mansion & Garden Stuff pack is the The Sims 2's final stuff pack in the series. The Sims 2 Store The Sims 2 Store is an online store where players of The Sims 2 for PC can download content for their game online. It offers objects, clothing, skins, and hairstyles that are both exclusive to the store and also come from earlier expansion and stuff packs. It also has featured seven exclusive item collections that can only be found in the store. The store uses a point system that players can purchase. It was launched in July 2008 as a beta version limited to the United States and Canada. To download, players must install The Sims 2 Store Edition and the EA Download Manager. The exclusive collections are "Cubic", "Art Deco", "Spooky", "Castle", "Asian Fusion", "Art Nouveaulicious" and "Oh Baby", including a total of 471 items. Film and TV series The Sims (working title) is a film currently in preproduction. The film will be live action. On May 25, 2007, it was announced that The Sims film rights had been purchased by 20th Century Fox. Not much is known yet about the upcoming film, although a rumored story involving the characters finding a way to control others through a "Sims"-like game has been reported on several movie sites. It will be written by Brian Lynch, co-writer of the Angel: After The Fall comics and writer/director of the 1999 film Big Helium Dog. The film will be produced by John Davis, responsible for films such as I, Robot and Predator. EA has officially announced it and a MySims animated television series in development at Film Roman. References External links *[http://thesims2.ea.com/ Official The Sims 2 website] * * * The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2 (February 2010) The Sims 2 The Sims 2 The Sims 2